Our attendance at the Samsung Global SSD Summit in South Korea brought us a first glimpse of a new standard in ultrabook storage performance. At the Summit, the Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe SSD was displayed reaching 1GB/s transfer speeds and Apple has since released their 2013 MacBook Air which has a customized variation of the XP941; this attaining native performance of 794MB/s. Most recently, Sony released their newest Vaio Pro 13 which also appears to have the XP941 installed and there is no doubt this ‘trickle effect’ of distribution will become a waterfall soon enough. For the first time, even our request for a review sample was put on hold as Samsung can’t seem to keep up with demand.

You can imagine our surprise when our good friend Rod Bland of RamCity in Sydney, Australia, asked if we would be interested in getting our hands on the new XP941 for review, sooner than later. Naturally, we jumped at the opportunity and the XP941 arrived from Australia in just under five days. Can anyone explain to me why it takes 3 months for my son to receive care packages from his mother while studying in Brisbane? In any case, the arrival of the Samsung XP941 left us in a bit of a predicament that had to be addressed; we had no means of benchmarking this rocket as our M.2 adapter equipped Asus mobo was only a single lane solution (500MB/s).

Luckily, we had contacts in Taiwan who were able to create just what we had in mind…and fast. We needed a solution that was future proof and our friends at Soliton Technologies went all out and sent us a PCIe 3.0 x16 NGFF/M.2 adapter. Considering that PCIe 3.0 reaches a bit rate of 8 GT/s, which translates to roughly 985 MB/s per lane, ‘overkill’ is pretty fitting as a pet name for this adapter. Even the much touted LSI SandForce ‘Griffin’ based M.2 PCIe SSD, capable of 1.8GB/s will be childs play once we get it in our hands.

THE SAMSUNG XP941 M.2 PCIE SSD

The Samsung XP941 is a client M.2 PCIe SSD and will be available in the notebooks of several manufacturers very soon. Although the XP941 will not be available as a retail SSD, it is available through limited third party vendors such as RamCity. Presently, we are aware that it is available in the newly released Sony Vaio Pro 13 ultrabook and, as well, a custom design of this SSD is found within the new Apple MacBook Air.

It is being manufactured in capacities of 128, 256 and 512GB and claimed performance is up to 1170MB/s read and 970MB/s write with IOPS reaching 122K read and 72K write, all within PCIe 2.0 x4 lane environment. Performance is variable, depending on capacity, and write performance of the 128GB capacity is 450MB/s with it jumping to 800MB/s for the 256GB capacity.

The Samsung XP 941 contains Samsung’s 3-core eight channel MDX (300MHz) controller which is custom designed for PCIe and eliminates the bottlenecks seen in SATA 3. Beside the controller is 512MB LP (low power) DDR2 Samsung DRAM cache, along with 4 modules of Samsung’s 64Gb MLC NAND flash memory, each module having a RAW capacity of 128GB.

Once formatted, the final capacity of the XP 941, that is available for user storage, is 477GB. As well, product warranty for client SSDs is the responsibility of each system manufacturer.

Having said that, we have no problem giving a quick plug to RamCity as they have an absolutely massive selection of Samsung consumer, client and enterprise SSDs available for purchase. Where many find drives such as the Samsung 843T almost impossible to obtain in smaller volumes through Samsung, Ram City has them in stock and, well, they got our drive to us in Canada in less than a week.

64 comments

“The XP941 is fast becoming the ‘new standard’ and Samsung’s inability to provide review samples to media demonstrates the demand that they are challenged with.” In my opinion Apple just prohibited a distribution of this devices for maybe half a year. It’s like the new Haswell chips from Intel. They pay a premium price and get the chips exclusively.

No drivers were needed whatsoever. It was recognized and formatted without issue in the adapter. If you would like to suggest a possible driver, by all means we can try it out if it might improove the end IOPS.

I recently purchased a Samsung Ativ book 9 plus. It has an msata toshiba ssd in it with a 2280 form factor. It is supposedly an m.2 form factor, but does that mean the controller actually resides on the drive ? Thanks.

That is not what I was looking for although you answered a question. The SSD in there is a mSATA and only 128GB so you wil only get nominal performance.. Send an ATTO or Crystal Diskmark result with the performance results….not Crystal Disk Info

In looking at this performance, you either have a mSATA or M.2 SATA SSD installed. In any event, you could not install a PCIe that would get better performance than this as your system is limited to the SATA speeds. What is your system model number.

Yup it may be, however, it is most likely still a SATA M.2. There is a difference between PCIe M.2 and SATA M.2 SSDs which, believe it or not as as small of a difference as the switching of wires in the interface. The end result, however, is that the SATA M.2 is still limited to SATA speeds as you are seeing here. Your SSD is the Toshiba version and, in fact, we are about to review the 512GB capacity of that same SSD very shortly…have it right here in front of me.

Thanks much, Les. At least now I can stop drooling over the pcie ssds ! I’ll still be upgrading this once I can find something bigger and with the appropriate form factor. Looking forward to your review of the 512 GB version.

I own a Vaio Pro 13 and it’s an European version, so a SATA M.2 is installed. I’ve got a 128 GB SSD because an upgrade to 265 GB would have cost me $ 220 (€160). I figured I could spend $220 for another SSD and own 2 SSD instead of 1. But at the moment of buying the laptop I wasn’t aware a M.2 SSD would be installed, guess I should have know better with such a small laptop 😉 So now I’ve got some questions while I’m searching for a new SSD, but there’s not so much information on the internet about the differences between SATA M.2 and PCI M.2.

If I understand it correctly there is a physical difference on the motherboard between the two Vaio Pro versions? One version will allow a PCI SSD and the other won’t?If I look at the explanation of the following image (https://www.tomshardware.com/gallery/flowchart3,0101-399299-0-2-3-1-png-.html) it states that a double configuration is possible. That the wiring could be supporting a PCI and SATA SSD. I was wondering if it’s likely that Sony has applied something like this. That there’s one similar motherboard in production and Sony only changes the installed SSD? Is there any way you could find this out?

Thx, for the help btw. This article and your explanations already clarified a lot for me, but some things remain a little bit foggy 😉

That article says ‘possibly both’ but that is not possible at this point. It is either one or the other, and quite frankly, I don’t see how it is possible. The system you have is a SATA M.2 and youre next quest will be to find a larger M.2 SSD no doubt.

Thx for the clear and fast answer, then I’ll go looking for a bigger SATA M.2. Now I only have to wait until they are available 🙂 And I wasn’t talking about the Asus Maximus mentioned in this article, but the motherboard used in the Vaio Pro. I tried to figure out which motherboard is used by the Vaio and Everest only gives the following information: Sony SVP1321C5E. CPU-Z only mentions Sony as the manufacturer of the motherboard with VAIO as the model.

Enuff already!!! They need to start selling the m.2s at newegg along with a simple 4x PCIE adapter. Nearly every mobo has an empty 4x slot in between the 1x and 8x/16x slots. Even better, since the m.2s are so small, LSI could make a killing by making a raid0 capable x4 adapter with room for a pair of m.2s. But noooOOO….everyone one’s gonna wait till next year for sata express to launch. Gah!!

Does anyone know if the 1TB flash option in the new iMac’s (showing as APPLE SSD SM1024F in the hardware profile) uses the XP941? At twice the maximum capacity, it would need two of them, so how does that fit with its single PCIe connector?

The SSD is listed as APPLE SSD SM1024F which means it is definitely a Samsung and 1024. We haven’t seen 1TB capacities of the XP941 but it is entirely possible. Impossible is getting any information, short of ripping apart a new iMac as the confidentiality agreement between Samsung and Apple is ironclad.

IMHO there is no guarantee that a single hardware profile entry denotes a single device. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Fusion Drive shows up as a single entry as well. Btw, the new MacBook Pro’s and Mac Pro offer an option of “1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage”, where at least you can be sure no PCIe/mSATA mixture is involved.

Maybe I have missed something but I don’t think we have ever seen a single storage device as being more than one device. To further support things, this number folllows the exact numbering pattern of every other Samsung/Apple SSD used. Could I be wrong? There are no absolutes as we haven’t the answer yet but my guess is a single full length custom PCIe SSD.

Thanks for the quick response. Im a bit naive here but what can I do in order to improve my iMac and hard drive performance? I currently have the new late 2013 iMac 27, with a normal 1TB 7200rpm hard drive.

Shall I remove this drive and replace it with a SATA SSD drive (such as a OCZ 256GB Vertex 3) and then use hard drive i removed from the mac, hook it into a external enclosure and using Thunderbolt connect it back to the iMac? (Using the SSD for the Operating system and applications and the External thunderbolt drive as storage drive)?

Hi Les Tokar, thanks for the detailed review and all the extra info on this!

One question remains: Samsung uses the pinnacle of modern lithography to etch those chips, yet the print quality of Brand name and the various ID and serial numbers on the outside of the chips is so unbelievably poor! Letters aren’t lined up, half of the text wants to disappear into the murk…

Was it their plan to bring together the best and the worst of lithography in one place in some strange twist of irony?

Some of that is our doing as the etching fades somewhat over use and time, compounded by the brending sticker removal which leaves residue that must be removed. This SSD had a great deal of handling before snaps.

I’m completely new to this and stumbled in here after seeinga motherboard I’m looking at mention M.2 SSDs and now I’m all intrigued. Would the Soliton 16x adapter work in a 16x 8x electrical slot (although at diminished capacity) or does it require full 16x electrical to work at all? Would a M.2 SSD on it be Windows installable/bootable? Support all the ssd/sata things like trim etc?

The X16 adapter will work at any level required of it by the M.2 SSD. The SSD will not be bootable through that unless there are boot instructions within the SSD as we recently saw with the Plextor SSD in the ioSwitch Raijin.

Beside Apple MacBook Air.and Sony Vaio Pro 13, do you know other manufacturer that uses XP941 ? I want to buy an notebook / ultrabook and I was looking for more options than the 2 above mentioned. Thanks.

The article is 2 plus years old. There are a few similar that can be purchased with the PCIe X4 adapter…even new drives just being released… I might check the website in the next day or so for such a report!

I installed a xp941 256g M.2 SSD on a asus x99-a mobo. I have been unable to install win 8.1 on it. I have upgraded my bios to the latest and have tried many combinations of bios setup with no relief. The installation hangs at the partitioning step. It reports the drive as locked and won’t proceed. It is unable to create a partitioned drive. I have checked the drive with several different HD software products. It doesn’t produce any errors on a surface test. I can partition and format with no problem. Any suggestions on how to get around this problem. Samsung support wasn’t very helpful. Neither was microsoft or ASUS.